solving family history one branch at a time.

Making people real…

26December 2017December 26, 2017

It is more about names and dates. It is about putting the meat on the bones. To make our ancestors real. It is about researching their daily lives and proving or disproving family lore. Unfortunately, we are not all descendants of Pochahontas, some of us are just regular folks.

Newspapers are a fabulous way to make our ancestors real. My family settled in upstate New York after the American Revolution, mostly in Clinton County. For me I have found a wealth of information in the Plattsburgh Sentinel. New York has a fabulous resource of New York Historical Newspapers. BEWARE, it is a fun rabbit hole to go down. I spend countless hours there.

I know very little about my husband’s family and my mother-in-law passed in 2013. I remember many moons ago her telling me that her grandmother lived in a hotel. Well I am not sure if they really lived in a hotel but her mother went on vacation with them to Canada. I also found some of the only evidence of her grandparents together though I can not confirm it except in these two news clippings. Patricia Moran and Robert Bass are my husband’s grandparents. We are slowly building pictures of his Bass line and it is interesting and makes me feel like a detective as every piece I prove was done with no help. I do talk to my mother-in-law about what I find and I know if she was here she would get a kick out of it all.

Obituaries are fabulous sources for information also, you can sometimes find next of kin and children and grandchildren.

If you have research that leads you to Brooklyn, make sure to check out the Brooklyn Eagle. It is where I found the 2 articles about Patricia Moran and Robert Bass.

I am in the process of drawing up some research goals and a plan for 2018, I am going to want to practice some of what I learned in the Boston University Genealogy Certificate Program so stay tuned for an exciting announcement.